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This paper looks at how stakeholders co-create value at mega-events from a service ecosystem perspective. Despite the growing interest, little is known about how value is co-created through such initiatives for individual stakeholders and the community.

Drawing on institutional and stakeholder theory, the study focuses on Cortina 2021, the World Ski Championships held in Italy in February 2021. It investigates how multiple actors co-create value within a service ecosystem through qualitative interviews with key stakeholders combined with the analysis of official documents and reports.

The research established that key stakeholders were willing to get involved with Cortina 2021 if they recognised the value which could be co-created. Such an ecosystem requires a focal organisation with a clear regulative and normative framework and a common cultural basis. The latter helped resilience in the extraordinary circumstances of Cortina 2021 and safeguarded long-term impacts, even though the expected short-term ones were compromised.

From a managerial point of view, the evidence from Cortina 2021 shows how a clear strategy with well-defined stakeholder engagement mechanisms can facilitate value co-creation in service ecosystems. Moreover, when regulative and normative elements are blurred because of an extraordinary circumstance, resource integration and value creation processes need to be entrusted to those cultural elements that characterise an ecosystem.

The study takes an ecosystemic approach to mega-events to explore value creation for the whole community at the macro level, not only at the individual or organisational level, even during a crisis, which greatly impaired the preparation and running of the event.

This systematic review aims to comprehensively explore the existing literature on the use of corporate communication within the realm of social media.

A total of 136 peer-reviewed journal articles are explored and analysed using both performance and bibliometric analysis.

This review identifies five main findings: (1) trends in corporate social media research that highlight the growth trajectory of research on social media use for corporate disclosure, (2) geographical coverage of studies indicating the concentration of research in certain regions, such as the USA, followed by China and the UK, with notable gaps in others, such as developing countries, (3) theoretical frameworks employed demonstrate that various theoretical frameworks are utilized, although a significant portion of the studies do not specify any theoretical underpinning, (4) social media platforms studied, confirming Twitter to be the most studied channel followed by Facebook and (5) thematic analysis of articles on disclosure type that categorized the articles using bibliometric analysis into five themes of disclosure: general disclosure, corporate social responsibility-related information, financial information, CEO announcements and strategic news communication. A subsequent cross-theme analysis classifies disclosure determinants and consequences of corporate social media usage.

Through a comprehensive and systematic analysis of existing research, this review offers novel insights into the current state of corporate communication on social media. It consolidates current knowledge, highlights under-explored areas in the existing literature and proposes new directions and potential avenues for future research.